The Iran Nuclear Deal Crisis: Briefing & Analysis

14 May 2019

Where are we at?

There is a lot going on this week with the US and China at each other’s throats over trade. Thankfully, and hopefully, the US and China are not close to war. The US trade embargo is not the same as the oil embargo placed by Washington on Tojo’s Japan prior to Pearl Harbor, not least because Xi’s China is far stronger in relative terms than Tojo’s Japan ever was – aircraft carriers, super-battleships and all.  The more pressing issue is the growing stand-off between the US and Iran in the Gulf. Last week the US despatched the super-carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group to the Gulf. It also despatched a missile defence battery and a bomber group to the region. The US also has some 5000 troops still in Iraq. 

Washington is ratcheting up pressure on Tehran a year after the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, that limited Iran’s nuclear ambitions in return for the progressive lifting of economic sanctions. If a conflict does break out it would be a very twenty-first century war with America’s advanced stand-off strike capabilities facing Iran’s use of proxies and terrorists. One reason nothing has happened yet is that Tehran is using the sixty days withdrawal notice permitted under JCPOA to put pressure on the so-called E3 to convince Washington to ease off. The E3 – Britain, France and Germany – were signatories to the JCPOA and a conflict would be the first real test of transatlantic cohesion under Trump.  The US and its major European allies simply disagree over how to handle the Middle East, in general, and Iran, in particular. Regional strategic implications also abound. Iran’s regional enemies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are on full alert.  Geopolitics are also apparent. How would Russia, following its ‘victory’ in the Syria War and ever-more-influential China react to a US fight with Iran?  

How did we get here?

The JCPOA was agreed on 14 July, 2015 in Vienna between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the E3/EU+3. It states: “The E3/EU3+3 (China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) with the Islamic Republic of Iran welcomes the historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which will ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful, and mark a fundamental shift in their approach to this issue”.  Whilst the JCPOA concerns the nature and scope of Iran’s ambitions to build nuclear weapons the Accord was as much about contemporary geopolitics and the regional-strategic security and stability of the Middle East. 

The JCPOA was 159 pages long, attesting to its complexity and extensive efforts to build on the November 2013 Geneva Accord.  The main aim of the Accord was to reaffirm the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as the essential benchmark for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to so-called non-nuclear weapons states (NNWS). Under the agreement Iran was to be transformed from a so-called ‘threshold state’ into a non-nuclear weapons state. Iran was also be required to end “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear programme. 

Central to the Accord were strengthened safeguards and a verification and inspection regime by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) that was intrusive, even if it stopped short of ‘no warning inspections’. It was a Safeguards Regime that was based on, but more extensive than, that agreed under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  IAEA inspectors also had the right to inspect so-called ‘suspicious facilities’.  However, because the inspectors were unable to carry out snap exercises some concluded the Iranians had cheated, most notably Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, even though on June 6 2018 the IAEA reported that Iran was in compliance. 

The focus of the Accord was on preventing the weapons-grade enrichment of both uranium 235 and plutonium.  Uranium enrichment was to be curtailed by reducing the number of operational centrifuges from 19,000 to 5000 and limiting Iran to the use of short lifespan first generation centrifuges.  Medium-enriched uranium was to be rendered unfit for use in weapons.  Some 9700 kg of Iran’s 10,000 kg low-enriched uranium was also to be shipped abroad.  Fordow, one of two main research and development sites, was to cease all enrichment and become a physics research centre with no access to fissile material for at least 15 years.  The Arak heavy water reactor vital to the development of weapons grade plutonium was to have its core destroyed and, under the terms of the Accord, Iran would seek no heavy water production again for at least 15 years.  Iran is now threatening to abandon those central provisions of the Accord. Specifically, Tehran has threatened to limit its stockpile of low-enriched (non-weapons-grade) uranium to 300 kg and its heavy water reserve to 130 tons.

Under the terms of the Accord the EU, US and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) agreed to lift a range of trade sanctions and unfreeze some $150 bn of Iranian oil assets held in foreign banks.  However, sanctions relief was linked to Iran’s compliance over time and thus would only take place in stages.  Critically, there was to be no complete relief from sanctions until the agreement had been implemented in full and the Arak reactor destroyed.  A strong so-called ‘snap back’ regime was also put in place that allowed for sanctions to be re-imposed quickly if the Accord was breached, and without recourse to a further UNSC Resolution.

On May 8 2018 the United States withdrew from the JCPOA on the grounds that the Accord was insufficiently robust and re-imposed sanctions. In a sign of the depth of transatlantic tensions over Iran and the Accord, on May 17 the European Commission declared “illegal” the US sanctions on Iran as they applied to European doing business with Iran, and instructed the European Central Bank to facilitate investment to Iran.

Assessment

To understand the events of the past week one has to consider the nature of the Iranian regime and the respective world-views of President Trump and many Europeans. This is one of those moments in international relations when all Parties can claim virtue, and yet all are Parties are at fault.  There is some evidence Iran has been cheating on some of the Accord’s provisions and Washington (and Tel Aviv) is right to be concerned about that.  At the same time, the fact of the Accord was a political and strategic breakthrough that could in time have led to improved relations between the West and Iran.

Critical to understanding current tensions is a key phrase in the Accord reads, “They [the Parties to the Accord] anticipate that full implementation of this JCPOA will contribute to regional and international peace and security”.  The Trump administration believes Tehran has made no such attempt to implement that provision and has decided to exert what it calls “maximum pressure” on Tehran to change its wider foreign policy. Brian Hook, the US special representative on Iran, called the US action a “response to Iranian aggression”. “Everything we are doing is defensive”, he went on. “Iran is still the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world. If they’re behaving this way without a nuclear weapon, imagine how they’ll behave with one”.    

Critically, the Trump administration has never liked the JCPOA, which it sees as the leitmotif for Obama’s (and European) weakness in its dealings with Iran. Indeed, for Trump the JCPOA is a weak ‘deal’ which Iran won from a weak Administration. There is also no small part of American domestic politics at play here. Critics also note the timing of the US withdrawal from the Accord and it closeness to a 2018 visit to the US by Israeli Premier Netanyahu. Hook says that the US aim is not provoke a war.  “We have two goals that overlap”, he states. “One is that we’d like to get a new and better deal that succeeds the Iran nuclear deal. It will be comprehensive: nukes, missiles, regional aggression [by Iran] and human rights”. Hook also claims that Washington is seeking to make “…Iran’s foreign policy unsustainable”. This probably refers to Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, as well as Houthi militias in Yemen.

The timing of this latest round of tension is also important. For a time Shia Iran was deeply concerned by the rise of Sunni Islamic State and focussed on the war in Syria. The JCPOA was partly reflective of Iran’s regional concerns between 2013 and 2017. The public suspension of Iran’s nuclear ambitions helped to forge an implicit anti-IS ‘coalition’ at least over the short-term. Those concerns have now abated and the US clearly has some intelligence to suggest Iran is beginning to ramp up its nuclear programme again.

The security of Israel is also a key issue for the Americans. The Accord did not lead to a shift in Tehran long-standing and extreme hostility to Israel.  Indeed, the Americans have long been concerned that post-sanctions oil-income would bolster Iran’s wider policy of funding and arming anti-Israeli proxies, and strengthen the role and position of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Syria.  With Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza restocked and re-supplied and President Assad in Syria now bolstered Iran the Americans have some cause for concern.  

The geopolitics of this crisis is equally concerning. The Accord was reflective of a struggle between a rules-based international order and Machtpolitik. It is the latter that would appear to prevailing as the world teeters in the balance between a treaty-based world order and a new balance of power and global disorder. As such the Accord was a modest but important step back from the brink of Machtpolitik in the Middle East and its demise (for in the absence of US support its demise is surely now a given) could well herald acceleration in the regional and, quite possibly, the global arms races both of which are already underway.

China and Russia? China has called for the Accord to be implemented in full. At the same time, China has established a naval base at Djibouti and continues to extend its influence in the Gulf and the wider Middle East.  Russia succeeded in Syria at the expense of the US and its disparate European allies. The West is now seen as a busted flush across much of the Middle East.

Where next?

Where next? For Americans power, albeit under law, is the essence of foreign and security policy, for Europeans law for law’s sake has become what exists of their collective or common foreign and security policy. For President Trump, the power of the presidency to exercise American power in what he sees as the vital American interest. His use of presidential authority and powers is also the source of much contention between him and much of Congress. That battle is also apparent in this conflict.

As for the Europeans, the EU has become the very embodiment of Europe’s abandonment of hard power as an instrument of policy. As an aside, Jeremy Hunt, a British prime ministerial wannabe, yesterday called for Britain’s hard power to be rebuilt. Like most European states these days, it is questionable if Britain’s hard edge could now survive its soft virtue-signalling core.  The best that might thus be said of the ‘West’s’ approach to Iran is that the US is playing ‘bad cop’, whilst the Europeans have cast themselves as ‘good cops’. In fact, Americans and Europeans simply disagree over how to deal with Iran and the wider Middle East.

As for the regime in Tehran, no-one should be under any illusions as to the extent of its regional-strategic ambitions.  Iran is a Persian, Shia country in an Arab, predominantly Sunni region. There is every reason to believe that unless contained Iran will continue to use proxy militias and terrorists groups to destabilise the Arab states to its west and south.  Iran has also not given up on its ambitions to become a nuclear power, even if (or partially because) Tehran also fully aware that Saudi money paid for much of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, and that Riyadh is quite capable of rapidly becoming a nuclear power should (when) the Accord falter.  Iran will certainly seek to gain from the profound division between the Trump administration and its European allies.   

Within Iran, tensions remain between relative moderates around President Rouhani, who believe that Iran’s changing society must accommodate itself, at least to some extent, with globalisation, and hard-liners in and around the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei and the powerful Revolutionary Guard, who see themselves as the guardians of the 1979 Revolution.  Equally, it would be far too simplistic to suggest there is a split between Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani.  Iran remains first and foremost an Islamic Republic with clerical power still the deciding force in Iranian policy-making.  The Accord itself reflected an accommodation between the two factions.

There are some indications that Iran would prefer to avoid an open conflict with the US right now. However, whether or not elements of the JCPOA survive this particular moment of tension the trajectory towards conflict remains unless there is a game-changer.

Julian Lindley-French